Starting: How Long Should Your Business Plan Be?

We typically tell entrepreneurs that a business plan should be about 25-30 pages max, without title page, table of contents, financials, and appendices. Any shorter, they've likely short-changed one of the sections. Any longer, they've probably gone overboard on something (usually product, industry and/or market). Once they have that, they can then edit down for special requests...anything from a 1-2 page executive summary to a 3-5 page venture summary.

One thing missing on the length issue is the purpose of the plan. Looking for $5 million venture capital will require more detail and length than a $75k bank loan. I don’t worry about number of pages. For internal use, eliminate all the “fluff” and “sales points.” I’d think 10 pages plus appendices seems plenty. Some can even be less.

The major deficiencies that we at the SBA notice when reviewing business plans are qualitative in nature, and not quantitative. In other words, I have seen good plans that were only 15 pages long, and bad plans that were 30 pages long.

And From The Books:

Portable MBA in Finance and Accounting, p. 261-2 For a business plan to raise debt or equity, 25-40 pages, and "less is more." For a "dehydrated business plan, the purpose of which is to provide an initial conception of the business," no more than 10 pages.